Once, the demigod Hercules (Herakles) travelled to Troy and killed a sea-monster for the city’s king, Laomedon. When Laomedon refused to pay the hero for his services, things took a dramatic turn.

According to the Prose Edda, attributed to the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), the Norse gods were foreigners. They had made the trek northwards and westwards from their original home in Anatolia: the ancient city of Troy.

Odysseus’ performs many ill-deeds on his twenty-year journey from Ithaca to Troy and back again. In the modern world, we are often enraptured by the details of his journey, but we can also be deeply ambivalent about the complicated man himself.

A beautiful fresco from Pompeii depicts a scene straight from Virgil’s Aeneid: Aeneas being treated for a leg wound.

In this article, we explore two important concepts of the warrior ethos that was at the heart of ancient Greek culture.

Some material in a doctoral thesis never makes the final cut, but can instead be turned into articles. An example is a peer-reviewed article that I wrote about romantic love in the Homeric epics.

Roel Konijnendijk, Matthew Lloyd, and Josho Brouwers talk about the sword-and-sandal film Troy (2004), directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

The Trojan hero Aeneas, made famous by Virgil’s epic poem, has been the subject of ancient texts and art going as far back as Homer.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was inspired by a myriad of different world cultures. In her twentieth novel, Lavinia, she took as inspiration Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid.

Of all the tragic figures in the story of the Trojan War, perhaps none has suffered more than poor Cassandra.